ARGENTINE TERROR: AN ECONOMIC POLICY

...Rodolfo Walsh, novelist and journalist, who disappeared after publishing his open letter of protest to the junta in March 1977, and Jose Patricia and Maria Acuna, proprietors for the last twenty-two years of the bookstore Libreria Pala-bras, who were arrested last March...

...Many disciplines—including folklore, design, and oceanography—have been canceled for their potentially dangerous ideology...

...Argentine history works to intensify the clash of interests...

...The creative and intellectual life that was once Argentina's pride has virtually been effaced by the junta...

...The new law of union organization would permit only local unions and provincial confederations, while banning closed shops, industrywide organizing, and political activity...

...But now, on the pretext that universities are breeding-grounds for "international subversion" (often rendered as "Jewish Marxist subversion"), the military has eliminated evening classes and severely restricted admissions...

...In 1918, Argentine universities gained autonomy and a large measure of student control which weathered many dictatorships...

...It was later made clear that the "dialogue" would not involve current political leaders...

...Real wages have been cut by 60 per cent since 1975, and are today c...

...When the military intervened in newspapers and universities, thousands of professors were fired, hundreds of journalists killed, kidnapped, jailed, or exiled...

...borrowing from private as well as public banks to refinance the foreign debt...

...Argentina is listed...

...Hundreds of thousands have gone into exile...

...The vanishing of the witness of the vanished is its most indelible emblem...

...industrial concentration on raw materials for export (in Argentina, petroleum, petrochemicals, grain, beef, and ancillary packing industries) at the expense of both heavy industry and diversified smaller enterprises...

...On the day of the junta's coup, hundreds of labor activists were arrested...

...Two labor leaders who paused for a drink with some journalists at a bar opposite the Ministry watched their confederates being driven away in unmarked cars...

...The Argentine working class is generally regarded as the most militant and class-conscious in the hemisphere...

...under the new law, government and private interests would control these services, probably increasing cost and reducing quality...

...The press has remained silent, censored and self-censored, but on some occasions several hundred women, wearing white kerchiefs, have assembled to shout, "Where is my child...

...Show me my child...

...If this tribunal should convene, it would bring the blurred reality of Argentina into sharp focus...

...On April 23, they were summoned to a meeting at the Ministry of Labor in Buenos Aires...

...ULast May, the First International Solidarity Congress with Argentina was held at the United Nations Church Center...

...among the countries of highest risk...

...Argentine terror: an economic policy The profit in suppressing human rights Bell Gale Chevigny Every Thursday for more than two years now, eight women whose children have "disappeared" since the Argentine military coup of March 1976 have gathered opposite the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires to demand news of their children...

...He also is by ideology and tradition a full-fledged member of the ancient landholding oligarchy in Argentina, a caste which throughout the Nineteenth Century happily cooperated with British imperialism in exchange for help in suppressing the federalists and nationalists of the interior...

...And it would clearly illuminate the close connection between repression of human rights and economic dependency...

...In August, doubtless to thwart an investigation by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States, Argentine security officers confiscated documents about disappeared persons in raids on the three leading human-rights organizations...

...But when forty members of the centrist Radical Party issued a statement welcoming dialogue, they were promptly ordered to police headquarters...

...subversive terror spawned in Europe was defeated in the Southern Cone of Latin America only by the armed forces...

...I learned at the Solidarity Congress that students, oppressed by the narrowness of university life, increasingly attend secret union meetings...

...Many delegates to last spring's Solidarity Congress argued that the violation of human rights must be seen as a direct consequence of Martinez de Hoz's plan to crush the labor movement and increase the economic dependency of Argentina...

...According to the old law of social services, unions provide the workers with clinics, drugs, insurance, travel agencies, and vacation resorts...

...Disappearance is only the most sinister of the state's repressive tactics: A conservative count of the murdered is 5,000, and Amnesty International estimates there are between 3,000 and 4,000 political prisoners, most of them held without charges...

...The call for a national day of protest on April 27, therefore, was less a bold initiative on the part of the Committee of 25 than a response to pressures from militant workers throughout the country...

...the creation of a consumer elite for foreign imports, and the "stabilization" of the economy through freeing of prices and freezing of wages...

...Argentine workers have responded with sabotage, slowdowns (known in Argentina as trabajo a tristeza), and countless illegal strikes, some of them crippling...

...In the industrial zone to the west of Buenos Aires, on two of the five railroad lines, and in the automotive industries in Cordoba, support of the strike ran close to 100 per cent...

...As a result, the more conservative National Labor Commission joined an umbrella organization to make common cause with the Committee of 25...

...Some of this silence can be attributed to the work of Bur-ston-Marsteller, a New York public relations agency under contract to the junta, which recommended in 1977 that the junta "project a new, progressive and stable image throughout the world" to those who influence thinking, travel, and investing...

...This grandiose analysis lends a chilling logic to what the junta has, in fact, been trying to do...

...Delegates came from sixteen countries, representing twenty-eight organizations whose members range from human-rights advocates to leftist activists...

...In this most industrialized nation of Latin America, virtually all the workers are organized...

...Not satisfied with keeping subversives out of school, Admiral Emilio Massera, now retired from the junta, displayed a vigilance rarely matched by any modern dictatorship: He scorned Marx for questioning "the inviolable character of private property," Freud for assaulting "the sacred space of innermost being," and Einstein's theory of relativity for leaving "in crisis the static condition of matter...

...Steel, Pan American, ITT, and the Morgan Bank...

...The Supreme Court subsequently ordered Timmerman released, and he went into exile in September...

...Junkets for journalists, businessmen, and members of Congress followed, and readers of The New York Times and Fortune can learn from paid advertisements how leftist terrorism provokes Argentine repression and what splendid investment opportunities Argentina provides...

...They shared and sharpened strategies, established an organizational network, and elected Thelma Dorothy Jara de Cabezas honorary president...

...But the workers also have their history—their memory of the radical redistribution of income and power during the Peronist decade...

...Moreover, the junta plans to revise laws of social services and union organization dating from the Peronist decade...

...State Department, the United Auto Workers, the AFL-CIO, and international labor federations contributed to their release...

...The chilling effect on those that remain is obvious...

...Though the head of the junta, Jorge Rafael Videla, had suspended all political activity, he offered a gesture in 1978 toward the restoration of democracy, calling for dialogue with representative civilian sectors...

...In a world full of confrontation, the larger argument goes, the Southern Cone becomes the last preserve of Western and Christian civilization...

...In one of its resolutions, the Congress called for the formation of an international tribunal to judge the crimes committed by the military junta and its accomplices...

...It is difficult to imagine how Argentina could avoid becoming either a more repressive dictatorship or a greater risk to foreign investors, or both...

...The country's steady retreat down the road to oblivion seemed paralleled by a deepening silence about it in the North American press...

...They also proposed the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize...

...But advertising cannot work miracles, and there are signs of growing resistance to the junta within and without: HThe International Congress of P.E.N., meeting in Rio de Janeiro last July, demanded appropriate action in these representative cases: Jacobo Timmerman, publisher of La Opinion, who had been in jail and under house arrest since early 1977...

...Neither the military oligarchy nor its opposition can afford to yield or even compromise...

...the importation of advanced technology for selected industries...

...Since these measures necessarily deepen the chasm between the rich and the poor, a range of rights must be suspended, and terrorism institutionalized...

...Last April 30, the group's executive secretary, Thelma Dorothy Jara de Cabezas, also disappeared...

...Elements of Martinez de Hoz's economic plan mirror those in effect in Chile, Peru, and Brazil: the selling of nationalized and private Argentine industry to multinationals...

...Although the National Labor Commission did not back the strike, even the government estimates that 40 to 47 per cent of industrial workers did...

...Ideological conflict will become obsolete...

...Combined with the mass dismissals of government employes, the lengthening of the work week in 1977, and the virtual freezing of wages despite the world's highest rate of inflation—about 170 per cent in the last two years—the disruption of the labor movement has wrought devastation among Argentina's workers...

...Uln the most open and unified act of resistance Argentina had witnessed in three years, the "Committee of 25," a group of Peronist labor leaders whose international recognition, solidarity, and moderation have all contributed to their survival, called for a day of protest—shunning the illegal term "general strike"—on April 27...

...The junta sometimes seems bent on making Argentina itself disappear...

...These historical experiences make it harder than elsewhere for these classes to accept austerity coupled with exploitation, destruction of familiar rights, and the sacrifice of national industry to foreign concerns...

...has virtually been effaced...

...because Marxist subversion in Argentina is generated outside the nation, perpetual vigilance must be maintained...

...In a parallel move, the government decreed that persons reBe// Gale Chevigny teaches North American and Latin American literature at the State University of New York at Purchase, and is the author of "The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings...

...The government repeatedly has trumpeted its victory over the guerrillas, but has retained the state of siege...

...The Argentine labor movement has posed the greatest threat to the junta...

...Juan Peron's first regime, from 1945 to 1955, was a horror for some sectors of the population, but it was chiefly a boon to the workers...

...soon it may achieve notoriety for its high drop-out rate from all levels of education...

...creative and intellectual life...

...What the government calls the "dirty war against subversion" originally had a finite goal—the elimination of the military arm of the Mon-toneros and of the People's Revolutionary Army...

...A plan for national reorganization, frequently cited by government officials, provides this ingenious rationale: Most of the governments in the West are assaulted and weakened by Marxism...

...eventually, political leaders who accept the junta's doctrines may emerge, and still later they may be chosen to form two or more political parties which will "contribute their help to national reorganization...

...They called not only for higher wages, normalization of the unions, and guarantees of their old rights, but also for the restoration of import taxes and the defense of national industry...

...Amnesty International estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 persons have disappeared, and new disappearances more than offset the return of some...

...Until recently it seemed possible that Argentina's disappearance might go unremarked...

...less than a third of corresponding wages for workers in the United States...

...ported missing may be declared legally dead after ninety days...

...Twenty were subsequently arrested, and fourteen of their colleagues in heavily-organized Cordoba, which has been a center of labor unrest, were also jailed...

...In sum, it would roll union strength back to what it was before the 1930s...

...They might have been heeding the old dictum of Peron: "We will go with our leaders at the head or with the head of the leaders...

...Dubbed the Locus de Plaza de Mayo by the military junta, the women have returned after beatings and arrests, and have worked their way into public meetings to raise their unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, question...

...Though they lost some of that equality after 1955, the need for a large internal market for national industry tended to make them more nearly equal consumers with other classes than was true elsewhere in Latin America...

...all labor federations were welded into one General Confederation of Workers (CGT), which won a wide range of benefits...

...Because growing numbers of small and medium-sized businesses producing for the internal market have been forced to sell out to monopolies or declare bankruptcy, such industrialist groups as the Economic Federation of Buenos Aires are joining labor's opposition to the junta...

...Martinez de Hoz does not simply serve the multinationals' interests (which he shares through his own influential affiliations with such multinationals as U.S...

...Moreover, new allies have emerged...

...Five years ago, Argentina claimed one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America...

...These directly assault the economic program of Minister of Economy Jose Alfredo Martinez de Hoz, which would entail the radical transformation—or deformation—of Argentina...

...Even generals assigned to some unions—steel and railroad workers, for instance—have been moved to argue for better conditions...

...Their resignations were demanded immediately...

...Argentina must set an example to the rest of the world...

...And as workers felt a proprietary interest in state enterprise, so did the owners of small and medium-sized business regard it as a necessary buffer against the hegemony of the multinational corporations...

...Military officers took over the most powerful unions and suspended the right to strike, meet, organize, or bargain collectively...

...Pressure from the U.S...

...In fact, Argentina is listed by international insuring agencies among the countries of highest risk, and has not been successful in attracting new productive investment...

...Equally significant was the range of demands of the strikers and the analysis implicit in them...